What I mean is that, from your set of experiments, you couldn't make the distinction between the MWI and, for sake of argument, God (If you don't like God then insert another unobservable possibility).
While I understand that the two aren't directly interchangeable (MWI has more empirical support than any deity) the point remains that you are not observing any of the potential many worlds in this scenario any more than you are observing God.
This makes the gravity analogy a poor one because, when it comes to gravity, we can directly observe that mass is related somehow to gravity and therefore is the probable source (via confirmation or whatever).
But where 's the "mass" in our anthropic explanation of the LHC thought experiments? It's some [currently] unobservable cosmological phenomenon.
The probability of all of those events would be increased with the observation of successive failures.
Lets go with the assumption that we've observed an appropriate number of successive LHC failures and have ruled out tampering.
Going on our observations we are left with very little information. I'm going to pull another Popperian move and ask, is there any way we can rule out all other explanations of the phenomenon and be left with exclusively the MWI? In other words, is the MWI interpretation falsifiable using our LHC experiments?
Obviously we reject the supernatural because its simply not falsifiable, but is there enough evidence that a) MWI is undeniably correct in all other contexts (QM, etc) and b) there are no other falsifiable explanations for the LHC phenomenon (understanding that there is always a limit to current human knowledge).
Perhaps MWI has more empirical support than I am aware of, but as far as I know we haven't made any empirical, testable and falsifiable observations of the many worlds, other than as a mathematical idea. Now I innocently ask, is that enough to rule out other potential (even supernatural) phenomenon in favor of MW?
I'm going to pull another Popperian move and ask, is there any way we can rule out all other explanations of the phenomenon and be left with exclusively the MWI?
There has never been and never will be a way to rule out all other explanations of any phenomenon and be left with only one hypothesis. What we can do is run experiments that show us that all the best competitors of our hypothesis are less probable than our hypothesis such that we can assign a very high probability to our hypothesis. I think we do that when once we rule out fraud and tampering. ...
Related to: How Many LHC Failures is Too Many?
My first reaction to this was that it had to be a joke, but I thought Less Wrong readers would like to know that The Times of London is reporting that repairs on the Large Hadron Collider have been delayed by overheating caused by a piece of bread, possibly dropped by a bird:
I'm rather confident that this is just a meaningless coincidence, but in light of the anthropic speculations last year about the LHC's technical difficulties, I thought this was worth sharing.
Hat tip MBlume